On her return to the UK, Yasmin met Mohammed, a British man of Caribbean descent, who had also converted. They married and had a child within a year. Mohammed started to beat her during her pregnancy and when their son was born threatened to kidnap him and take him to live in Jamaica. "I went to the imam for help but he just told me to look at my own behaviour. He said a good wife does not make her husband angry."

Yasmin fled from Mohammed and took her son to live in a refuge. She has changed her name and moved to another town, so scared is she of him tracking her down and killing her. "I know why he converted," she says, telling me she plans on giving up her faith and raising her son outside it. "Islam gave him the perfect excuse to treat his wife like dirt. It helped him feel like a real man. I thought being a good Muslim meant putting up with what he did to me, but no woman deserves that."

There are many women, I am told, who have converted to Islam, married a Muslim man and then live happily ever after. But, despite the fact that the women I spoke to were open and generous with their time and effort to help me understand why they had converted, I found I was unable to comprehend their choices. Perhaps it is my disdain for all religion, perhaps my radical feminism. And so I continue to ask, why do women in the West, having grown up with the benefits that four decades of feminism have brought, choose a lifestyle and religion which brings them such a subjugated existence?